Home Sweet Home!

After having spent 9 months in beautiful Romania I finally arrived home a month ago to start in a new position with my old company. The original plan was I would stay a year but there were some changes and I was offered this new position and asked to come home earlier. No matter how much I loved Romania and Bucharest I was happy to return to my family and the doggy friends!!!

So after settling in and arranging this and that I’m finally back to “normal”, the time spent in Romania seems like a wonderful dream now. Sometimes I have the feeling that I never left home.

It was wonderful to spend the holidays with my family and be out again in the Hungarian Puszta and hills. We didn’t make too big fuss about it this year as the kids had to study hard for their exams. So we had a quiet Christmas time and an even quieter New Year’s Eve. But we had a wonderful guest!!! As we knew we couldn’t travel anywhere because of the exams, we took care of a baby Border Collie, Skipper, whose owners had left for a 3 weeks holiday. Though he is only 6 months old, he is already bigger than our two old doggy friends!

He has enormous energy so we took him along to our Christmas and New Year’s walks. Our Christmas Walk took us into the Hungarian Puszta in wonderful weather. Everyone enjoyed the walk but I think it was Skipper who enjoyed it the most! He was running up and down and I could hardly catch him with the camera, he was moving so fast! The Puszta was beautiful, fortunately we had some leftover of snow, I just love when it’s white, which was only part of the case now.

On our way I spotted a huge black bird sitting on the top of a tree in the distance. I just couldn’t believe how the thin branches could hold this huge bird!!! This picture was taken with full zoom.

Then at home I enlarged the picture and I realized it was not one but two birds!! One of them I could recognize myself, it was a magpie. For the other one, I had to ask for the help of Istvan: he told me it was a common buzzard! They are really common in Hungary, a lot of them can be seen sitting on poles along motorways.

But it wasn’t only Skipper who was a happy boy during the walk, Gulyas enjoyed it as well, only in a different way!

We took another walk to end the year in a nice way: we went to our favourite mountain area called Börzsöny to take a wonderful ridge walk in an equally wonderful weather. It was kind of hard for me in the beginning to get back into shape, I had to realize I got lazy in Romania! So while the kids and the dogs were having a great time, I was trying to keep up the pace, huffing like a steam engine! But it was worth it, I let the pictures tell the rest!

Ian’s border collie has got so fat that I am sorry to say she could not get back in the van last time I took her with me for a run. I had to drive to a roadside bank that she could get up and step across!